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After ChatGPT 3.5 was released in December 2022, academia became more aware of artificial intelligence (AI) tools and conversations surrounding the impact of these tools in higher education. ChatGPT, an AI text generator, is a tool that uses machine learning to write in a human voice; ChatGPT is an advanced chatbot that can answer questions, hold a conversation, generate essays, construct outlines, write poetry and songs, and conduct any other text-based activity that a user prompts. Faculty often raise academic integrity concerns and other questions—what constitutes plagiarism with AI text generation tools? when and how should these tools be used by students? can students submit their original work for revision, reworking, or rewording to these tools?—immediately upon encountering these tools.
In light of this new technology and the potential impact on education, curriculum and class activities will need to be redesigned. Faculty may decide that redesigning their activities to incorporate these new tools is the route to take in order to prepare students for the future workplace. For this grant, we would like to support faculty interested in using ChatGPT to create new classroom activities, through understanding the tools, creating the activities, and having a place to upload and download the final activities. The activities will either use an AI tool or they need to teach an AI literacy skill in the classroom.
In response to these activity redesign needs, we would like to propose an open educational resource (OER) repository of AI class activities appropriate for college students in various disciplines. Open educational resources are any type of materials used in teaching, research, or other educational purposes without traditional copyright restrictions. This OER repository will house activities from multiple disciplines and multiple perspectives. Further, we want to encourage collaboration by collecting class activities from faculty across PALNI that can be used broadly across the consortium. In order to maintain a quality collection, each activity will go through a quality check before being added to the repository. The main financial need for this project will be stipend money to incentivize faculty to contribute to the collection and stipends to compensate for the hidden labor that goes into creating OER.
The Private Academic Library Network of Indiana (PALNI) awarded Butler University a grant to facilitate the creation of a collection of instructional activities and assignments that use generative AI. If you are a faculty member at a PALNI institution, we welcome you to participate in this project.
The goal of the grant is to develop an open repository of peer-reviewed generative AI class activities. Faculty will be able to search for ideas on how to use AI in their discipline or adapt inspiring ideas to fit their context.